New iTunes Plus

Well apparently Apple has released a new program for iTunes called iTunes Plus coinciding with their iTunes 7.2 release.

Some Details:

-The Music is DRM free.
-It has a bitrate of 256kbps, twice that of regular iTunes downloadable songs.
-No burn limits or computer limits.
-It costs $1.29 per song.
-It is available on select albums.
-An upgrade option is available for songs or albums you've already purchased for an additional 30 cents a song and 30% of the original album price for your album downloads. However you can not upgrade individual songs or albums. You must upgrade all available upgrades for your library.
-Most iTunes Plus albums are available for the same price as DRM-protected versions of the albums.

Music videos are also available DRM-Free with 256k audio tracks with no change in price but are 60 cents to upgrade if previously purchased.

Okay I read the story on the frontpage about your name and email being included in the music files...well now I'm not as enthusiastic as before...but I guess stripping your name and email from the files is better than stripping DRM?

Why would it matter? It is now DRM free, it can play on any player that can play mpeg4 files, thus poeple who were not going to pirate are good to go, those that were going to pirate the song would have found a way to do it anyway, so stripping a name away should be no problem.

I'm curious, now thinking about it, if the main reason Apple chose to upgrade the bitrate to 256kbps was so that it would be harder to crack their drm encryption. If they released the songs at 128kbps with the same AAC track as the protected versions then it would make it alot easier to reverse engineer the 2 different files by comparing them to figure out the DRM encryption. Anyone else thought about this? Just throwing it out there.

The DRM in iTunes 7.1 was already cracked before iTunes Plus came out. No, the reason they went higher bitrate is because people wanted it. Studios have been making the song volume higher and higher instead of letting the user choose by using their volume knob. This was done in an effort to be out there recognized over the other songs.

They do this by removing the peaks, and bringing the lows higher up, this way putting the entire song into the mid-band, which to us makes it seem louder, but it also removes quality. Then when it is re-encoded the file compression scheme will take some of these highs, and remove even more of them, and since they just brought the lows up higher it would start cutting into those as well. So now the song sounds flat.

On my Bose speakers I can hear the difference between the two qualities, on my car stereo speaker I cannot.